Just Give Laura Dern Every Award for Big Little Lies

Big Little Lies is nearly halfway through its second season, and most fans of the HBO drama have spent that time focused on Meryl Streep. That's understandable: The Oscar winner joined an already A-list cast to deliver a truly stunning performance as Mary Louise, Celeste's (Nicole Kidman's) enigmatic mother-in-law. She's a great addition to the series, no question.

But I think we should all be putting more energy into praising Laura Dern for breathing dragon fire into my forever queen, Renata Klein.

THAT DRESS.

HBO

This season the Monterey Five—Celeste, Jane (Shailene Woodley), Bonnie (Zoë Kravitz), Madeline (Reese Witherspoon), and Renata—are grappling with the aftermath of Perry’s death, which has permanently entangled them. While Renata’s problems are arguably less grave than her friends’—her husband, Gordon, was arrested for fraud, threatening the livelihood that Renata has worked so hard to achieve—that doesn't mean they're any less fascinating. She deals with her life being completely upended the only way she knows how: by turning into a hilarious, nightmarish rich lady who can’t stop shoving her finger in others’ faces and calling people “puss-fuck.”

We know that Dern is capable of reaching great depths just as Kidman, Streep, and Woodley have done this season on Big Little Lies. (She has an IMDb page full of examples of that.) But I don’t necessarily need that from Renata. Instead, I’m just enjoying watching Dern have a chance to play with the character. And she seems to be having the time of her life portraying a crumbling second-grade mother, a woman the school principal described as “Shakespearean.” She’s flexing a comedy muscle that real Dernanators will remember from her past work in Enlightened, which suggests to me that Dern thrives when she's playing emotionally embattled women who lash out in truly funny and watchable ways.

Every episode this season has been laced with Dern’s sharp-tongued glory. In the premiere we saw Dern living her best life, doing some nebulous “Women in Power” photo shoot on her pool deck. In a shimmery, extra, red power suit-dress, she stands arms akimbo and proudly sings, “It’s my house, and I live here.” She tells the photographer, “I’m so tired of those shots of women—I mean, they’re in power, right? They own banks and they’re all like demure? Bullshit.” In the second episode she tells her behind-bars husband, “I will not not be rich” before slamming the prison phone back into its receiver.

But her one-liners were especially savage last night, as when she told her criminal husband, surrounded by his model airplanes and other freaky adult male paraphernalia, “Sell your fucking toys.” In one particularly memorable monologue, Renata chewed out the school principal for teaching the kids about climate change, which led to her daughter Amabella's having an anxiety attack about the world ending. “I will be rich again," she spat. "I will rise up. I will buy a fucking polar bear for every kid in this school, and then I will squish you like the bug that you are.” She then turned to her daughter’s teacher and added, “And you. I can’t be bothered to squish you.”

I mean, sure, Renata is somewhat one-dimensional and superficial this season. But she’s giving us so much mean-rich-lady energy that it makes me want to glimpse into the depths of my soul and discover my own mean rich lady—despite having, uh, no money. Regardless, Renata is the inspiration I need to keep going in this hell-world of medical bills and student loan debt. I want to own a chic house on a cliff, be constantly dusted with salt spray, yell, “I will not not be rich,” and chill my (nonexistent) daughter’s schoolteachers to the bone.

Renata has already snapped this season, and I'm excited to see what joy Dern can bring in the next four episodes. But if Renata really loses everything she owns, after working so hard to earn it, she will truly, irreversibly, terrifyingly snap. I can't wait to watch.